ABE-Stat, a Fully Open-Source and Versatile Wireless Potentiostat Project Including Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy

Abstract

© The Author(s) 2019. Exciting discoveries in material science and molecular interactions are resulting in many promising electrochemical biosensor technologies. Compact, high-quality instrumentation is critical to adaptation of these new technologies especially for distributed applications in the agriculture and food industries. To this end, we have developed ABE-Stat, a fully open-source, battery-powered potentiostat project including a wireless Android interface. ABE-Stat is capable of conducting routine electrochemical analyses including cyclic voltammetry (CV), differential pulse voltammetry (DPV), high impedance potentiometric measurements, and can connect directly to the internet through WiFi or indirectly through the Android interface. Importantly it is the first fully open-source potentiostat capable of evaluating electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) across a wide frequency spectrum (0.1 Hz to 100 kHz) with user selectable amplitude and bias. Current noise was observed to be over an order of magnitude larger than the nominal resolution of the embedded 24-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), but were largely consistent with the actual ADC specifications. In this manuscript we share detailed documentation for ABE-Stat including hardware design and source code, and evaluation of the performance of all avaiable analyses. We also suggest design improvements that could improve the noise performance of ABE-Stat and consistency of EIS measurements across the spectrum.